I’m cold.
Everything in him stilled. It was the first complaint Nicolas heard her make. There was no whining in her tone, just a simple statement of fact, but it alarmed him.
We’ll be out of this soon. I’ve got us a place to spend the night. It even has hot water.
He stayed very close to her as they floated part of the way, allowing the river to carry them downstream faster. When the current began to increase in strength, Nicolas caught at Dahlia and dragged her smaller body to the edge of the river, staying in among the reeds and rocks. She didn’t resist him or try to pull away from him. That was nearly as alarming as her complaint.
Dahlia lay on the riverbank listening to the distant sounds of the chaos reigning at the house they’d just left. There were clouds in the sky and clouds in her mind. She had nothing left. Not her home or her family or even her possessions. Now, she wasn’t even certain her job at NCIS was left. Did they think she was the traitor? That she’d sold out for money? That she’d been a party to Jesse’s torture and her family’s murder? Someone in the home office of the NCIS had traded information on her for a great deal of money. She hoped it was worth it to them, because it left her with nothing.
“Are you all right, Dahlia?” Waves of sorrow poured off her. While he was feeling his most triumphant, almost a euphoric feeling, she was grieving. Nicolas swept back the cloud of wet hair from her face. “What are you thinking about?”
“Home. Family. Betrayal.” She turned her head to look at him. “You’re right, of course. Someone had to have sold me out. No one else knew about me other than a few I took my orders from. I was classified, their secret weapon. Someone at NCIS sold Jesse and me out for whatever those poor professors discovered.”
“The stealth torpedo.”
“I hate that thing.” Dahlia shivered. “We need a boat. Stealing is my specialty. Give me a few minutes and I’ll have transportation. At night, in the bayou, the canals all look the same on the waterway,” she added as a precaution.
“I’ll get us there, Dahlia,” Nicolas promised. He considered protesting as she slipped away to find a boat for them, but decided against it. He had respect for her skills. She knew what she was doing. Maybe that was what worried him the most. If she wanted to slip away from him . . . this was her territory. She knew the bayou, and she knew the islands. He could find her, but it would take time.
He thought about her tone. Home. Family. Betrayal. He had experienced the loss of his grandfathers and his world had turned upside down. Dahlia was grieving in the midst of running for her life. She had spent most of her life being betrayed on some level, and he was asking her to trust a complete stranger. Not only to trust him with her life, but with her heart.
“Are you going to go to sleep or come with me?” Dahlia’s voice called to him from the water. Few people could sneak up on him without his knowledge, and the fact that she had reinforced his belief that she was a true GhostWalker.
He sat up and searched the river. There was no boat that he could see, but he followed the sound of her voice, walking through the reeds around a narrow bend. The boat lay low on the surface, Dahlia barely a dark shadow sitting in one end. Nicolas lowered the pack into the boat, regarding it with a prejudiced eye. “Are you certain that will hold me? Is it a child’s toy? A raft?”
Her answering laugh was soft and fleeting, but it was there. “Big baby. Get in. It doesn’t make much noise and it’s sturdy. Of course once in a while alligators think they can crawl aboard and share the space. I’m letting you do the navigation, and if you get us lost, I won’t let you live it down.”
The small teasing note in her voice surprised them both. Dahlia rubbed at the mud on her face as she watched him climb gingerly aboard. The shallow boat rocked but didn’t submerge as he settled next to the tiny engine. “You look good with mud all over you,” he observed.
“It’s just as well,” she replied. “I seem to spend a lot more time with mud on me than with makeup.” She turned her head toward the middle of the river. “Get us out of here, Nicolas. I need to be away from everyone and everything.”
In profile, even in the night, he could see the sadness on her face. He reached out and touched her, ran his finger down her cheek. “It will be all right, Dahlia.”
She didn’t answer but settled into the boat and kept her face averted from him. He indicated his pack. “If you’re cold, there’s a jacket in there.”
That earned him a faint smile. “The magic pack.” She opened it and drew out the amethyst spheres. “I think you saved Jesse. Thank you.”
He nodded solemnly. “I think we may have managed it. I never felt that kind of power before. I’ve felt it gathering inside of me, but I was never able to focus it or use it. You did that for me.”
“Did I?” Dahlia spun the set of balls beneath her fingertips, concentrating, her tone vague as if she weren’t paying him much attention.
“You know you did.”
“I know I should be very sick from everything that happened, but I’m not. We used up the energy together. It wasn’t just me. Violent energy is the worst kind. It’s like handling unstable nitroglycerin.” She kept the spheres spinning beneath her palm, staring at them intently rather than at Nicolas. “I’m shaky, but I’m not overloaded. Whatever we did together helped.”
“Energy naturally wants to disperse,” Nicolas said.
“Yes, it’s a law of nature, yet I disrupt it. I draw energy to me like a magnet. I haven’t really figured out precisely how. And I can’t change it or lessen the drawing.”
Her voice was matter-of-fact, thoughtful even, but some small note alarmed him. She was in a pensive mood, and he felt his hold on her was fragile, tentative at best. He could almost feel her slipping through his fingers. He waited to answer her, choosing his response carefully, wanting to coax her to stay with him of her own free will.
He could sense that she wanted to leave. He touched her thoughts, an invasion of privacy, but the thought of her disappearing made him feel desperate. She was close to tears, somber, feeling both melancholy and edgy at the same time.
“It’s a good thing, what we did together tonight, Dahlia.” He appealed to the scientist in her. “I wonder if we could find a way to utilize and disperse all the energy flowing toward you if we practice together more. I feel it more and more, not the way you do, but I can tell it’s there now. If we work together we might find a use for it. I doubt Calhoun would have made it until the ambulance arrived if we hadn’t harnessed the energy, not to mention it was a great feeling to use something so ugly for something good.”
That caught her attention. She nodded in agreement. “I didn’t think of it like that. I suppose we could try again to mix different types of energy. I can focus fairly well if I’m not too overloaded, and for some reason, you lessen the impact when I’m physically touching you.” She looked out across the river at the city lights. “It’s so strange to be so close to people, yet so far away from them at the same time.”
“Have you ever worried that this superconductor business you do to help relieve the buildup of energy might be harmful to you?”